Homesteading

Another weekend up at the farm, and a lot of decisions were made. Good stuff.

So our home site is no longer our home site. We checked out the septic plan, and we would have been building on top of the leach field, or whatever it's called. Not awesome for a house (or for any structure that requires digging, since there are pipes down there). However, we already mostly cleared the area, so we decided to full-steam ahead and do a controlled burn of the felled blackberry brambles. Smoky work.







When one door closes, another opens. Turns out this area is going to be our animal garden! We plan to fence this area and put in a hen house and a goat shelter. In one of the "how to raise your own laying flock" books I checked out from the library, there was a picture of a happy chicken pecking at some huge zucchini. I'm excited to learn more about chickens and goats and their nutritional needs. I know the chickens will be stoked about the abundance of worms here.



Grizzly and Sunny (The Friends) had already cleared a bunch of poison oak, but it was seriously rampant. Grizzly decided to set out with the whipper snipper to avoid more contact. He was able to clear the whole proposed garden site and our new proposed home site, which will be right next to the garden.

Sunny and I spent some time turning over the ground in the little garden cage (DEER!). Hard work. Super hard. Clay!





Since the master plan is to extend the garden to cover this whole area (probably 6-8 times the size of the cage), and since we discovered how beautiful the area behind it could be for a home site (beautiful southern exposure), we decided that we should just get some kind of tiller in there and do the whole job at once. We'll need to improve the soil with some sandy loam and/or compost, so we'll till it in. Grizzly is working on securing a tiller, and Nick and I are looking into frugal fencing options. Grizzly had the brilliant idea to tie some cob work into the fencing for artistic/reinforcement/practice purposes. That will be our opportunity to discover our own perfect cob recipe! Exciting.

Sunny and I discovered (and have yet to explore in depth because we were without machetes) a Faerie Forest. Seriously, it's magic back there. Stoked.

My amazing uncle sent me this link to an article about an urban homesteader. How inspiring! I love that he read that article and thought of me.

So, what else is there in news from the home front? The kids were pretty bummed to come back, especially Eli. He did not want to leave the farm. I did my best to explain to him that we're going to spend a few days at home working on stuff for next weekend, and then we'll be back up there in a few days, but he was just plain sad. He woke up this morning telling me he wants to go back to Grizzly's house. In 6 weeks time, we'll be up there full time. Until then, we'll work on patience.